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And we must not despise the familiar observation that there
is something more to be considered than the present. There are
the periods of the past and, again, those in the future; and
these have everything to do with fixing worth of place.
Thus a man, once a ruler, will be made a slave because he abused
his power and because the fall is to his future good. Those that
have money will be made poor- and to the good poverty is no
hindrance. Those that have unjustly killed, are killed in turn,
unjustly as regards the murderer but justly as regards the
victim, and those that are to suffer are thrown into the path of
those that administer the merited treatment.
It is not an accident that makes a man a slave; no one is a
prisoner by chance; every bodily outrage has its due cause. The
man once did what he now suffers. A man that murders his mother
will become a woman and be murdered by a son; a man that wrongs a
woman will become a woman, to be wronged.
Hence arises that awesome word "Adrasteia" [the Inevadable
Retribution]; for in very truth this ordinance is an Adrasteia,
justice itself and a wonderful wisdom.
We cannot but recognize from what we observe in this universe
that some such principle of order prevails throughout the entire
of existence- the minutest of things a tributary to the vast
total; the marvellous art shown not merely in the mightiest works
and sublimest members of the All, but even amid such littleness
as one would think Providence must disdain: the varied
workmanship of wonder in any and every animal form; the world of
vegetation, too; the grace of fruits and even of leaves, the
lavishness, the delicacy, the diversity of exquisite bloom; and
all this not issuing once, and then to die out, but made ever and
ever anew as the Transcendent Beings move variously over this
earth.
In all the changing, there is no change by chance: there is no
taking of new forms but to desirable ends and in ways worthy of
Divine Powers. All that is Divine executes the Act of its
quality; its quality is the expression of its essential Being:
and this essential Being in the Divine is the Being whose
activities produce as one thing the desirable and the just- for
if the good and the just are not produced there, where, then,
have they their being?
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